LINGUISTIC CHALLENGES FACING THE LOCALIZATION OF VIDEO GAMES FROM ENGLISH INTO ARABIC
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Date
2023-05-14
Authors
Saqer Osama Sobhi Odeh
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Abstract
For more than two decades, the Arab gaming community has been growing continuously after the vast spread of technological devices. PCs, consoles (PS, Xbox, Nintendo, and so), and smartphones are mostly preferred by young Arabs due to peer pressure. The desire of Arab gamers to play more and more has made developers set up new goals to localize their English language games into many other Target Languages versions, leading to a new field in translation known as video game localization. This thesis has studied the localization of video games, and has provided a look at the Arabic translation process. In addition, it has attempted to understand how localized games are dealt with by their Arabic target audience, and what linguistic challenges they encounter. Using many examples of the community’s most popular video games, the researcher has focused on the challenges encountered during the localization process. He dwelled on discussion of linguistic challenges, the relationship between linguistic, cultural, terminological, and technical issues. Then, the researcher suggested possible solutions and better localization terms to show the gap between both the SL and the TL that localization faces, especially if it is not localized by a local translator.
Keywords: Arabic; English; Linguistic Challenges; Localization; Localizer; Video Game Localization; Video Games.